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A Day in the Life of a Copper

One of the exciting aspects of being a police officer is the fact that we never know what we are going to be faced with before we start work each day.

We may arrive at work for the start of the shift having made plans to deal with some mundane enquiry which has been sitting in your in-tray for some time only find that we have been roped in to an investigation into a serious incident which may have occurred over night. That mundane enquiry goes back to the bottom of the list.

We may be dealing with a list of day to day "Bread and Butter" tasks such as attending to a burglary complaint, stolen motor vehicle or damage to property, when we get sent to a higher priority incident such as a car crash on the highway, an assault in progress, or less frequently, the sudden unexpected death of a person. We never know what is around the corner.

Police Officers are trained to deal with a wide variety of incidents and happenings, but there is always the odd thing that crops up that we have not been trained to deal with, and have to make it up as we go along, such as disputes between unreasonable neighbours. These don't usually involve the breaking of the law, just pigheaded bloody mindedness, but because neither has the solution to the problem, they call the police. We are obliged to attend the dispute just to keep the peace if nothing else, but we always try to get them to a point of compromise. If you have ever wondered why so many male police officers have very short hair, it's to stop them from pulling it out.

Policing is constantly changing and keeping up with new technology. We all carry iPhones and iPads now carry out a lot of our duties and tasks while out on patrol instead of having to return to our desks to complete jobs.

Another big change is the move to "Prevention First" philosophy, which involves frontline police identifying problems and their causes within the community and introducing programs to try to reduce the number of individuals from our community from ending up in criminal court.

You may hear us complain from time to time, but it's still a great job. By Rural Community Constable Glynn Sharp

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